


Armistice, Armistice

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Quadrant Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: You are staring down destroyers and mages. But you have stared them down before, and horrible beasts besides, and you have always risen up.Rising this time will have to wait until resolution.





	Armistice, Armistice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liasangria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liasangria/gifts).



> pswap gift for manicpeixesdreamgirl, fellow lover of erifefsol and harbinger of emotional turmoil. lit   
> "post-sgrub au. eridan, feferi, and sollux had put their relationship issues aside to focus on winning the game. now that the trolls have achieved that goal and set themselves up as gods in the new universe, it's time for the three of them to sort out their various and conflicting feelings.
> 
> the phrase "pan-quadrant clusterfuck" comes to mind."
> 
> thank you for participating and hope you enjoy! stay gold

_Thanks for playing._

It blinks in the sky like its own constellation, high above your heads as if it’s still something out of your reach, after all the lot of you have been through. It’s kind of funny, you guess; you are all too stunned to laugh. 

A silence stretches the span of an insignificant spectrum, until your local outlier sputters, “That’s fucking IT?” and murmurs erupt like wriggler chatter, confusion making your fins prick. You can’t say you blame them, not really. You feel much the same. 

Now what? 

“Now,” you say, equipping your fork only to uncurl your fingers and let it drop to the ground (new ground, you can feel its potential through the soles of your feet) with a muffled thump, “now we build.” 

You relinquished whatever authority you held over your friends a long time ago. But you are all tired, and a little shell-shocked (hehe, shell, you hadn’t reely tried on that one) and your interim leader is content to just nod. 

So that’s what you do. Everyone has their place, in this born-again world of your creation, and you’re feeling pretty good about how the whole thing is looking. After all, wasn’t this the goal?

You think, maybe a little belatedly, that the goal may have gotten a little away from you and the rest of your teams. 

Everyone has their place, yes, of this you’re conchfident! What you feel less certain about is how many stumbles some will take to find them.

The stumble on your current plate takes place on a black-sanded beach, after the final streaks of red and orange disappear from the sky, swallowed by familiar grey. You quite literally trip into a standoff of sorts—one of the most peaceful ones, at least, in your recent memory. “Shoot—”

Two pairs of hands reach for you at the same time. 

On your right, cold nostalgia that you couldn’t forget if you tried (which, shamefully, you have); on your left, a jolt of warmth that pulses where thin fingers have wrapped around your bare upper arm. 

Neither of them are looking at you. You’re not sure whether it’s a good thing, but you are sure that you’re not about to wax ashen for this mess. “Hey,” you try. 

No good. Of all the trolls in your extinct world to ever chase after you, you had to get the ones with focus inscribed neck-deep into their slurry. It makes you roll your eyes, and you raise your hand (the right one, the cold one) to snap your fingers between their stares. “ _Hey_.” 

This time, they swivel towards you in tandem. It seems a cross-planet irony, in your opinion, that Eridan Ampora and Sollux Captor resent each other too much to see how alike they are. 

Eridan drops your arm like it’s on fire. Sollux holds on for a couple more seconds, then lets you go, turning his head away. “You okay?” 

“Fine,” you reply, eyeing him skeptically, and when he doesn’t say anything further, tack on an obligatory (and only the teeniest bit condescending), “are you?” 

He opens his mouth to answer, but Eridan beats him to it. “Great. Never better. Sol was just leavin’—”

“I’m pretty sure both my legs and my vocal cords are in working order, thank you,” Sollux shoots back. “Who died and made you king of the beach?” 

“I did! We all did! If I wanna carve some peace an’ fuckin’ quiet for myself after all we been through is it too much to ask? I don’t see a goddamn sign sayin’ otherwise!” 

“You just said it yourself, Ampora. We all died, and now we all want to go about our business without entitled saltbloods rehashing the system that died along with us. Can you see the moons with your head that far up your ass?” 

“For cod’s sake, enough!” 

Your volume takes all three of you by surprise, but it’s never been something that’s stopped you before. “Sollux isn’t going anywhere.” 

He blinks behind his glasses. “Uh. Thanks, I guess?” 

Eridan looks prepared to protest, hands half-curling at his sides, and you press onward before he gets a chance. “Because we’re sorting this whole thing out right now.” 

The pair of them gape at you. 

“You can’t be serious—”

“—outta line, Fef—”

“—none of your business, anyway—”

“—shit’s between me an’—”

“This _shit between you_ became my business since before we won. We. Are. Sorting this.” 

Even as you say it, you don’t know what it is you have _to_ sort: you’ve never been able to put a name to this mess that you’ve somehow been implicated in. Some days you think it boils down to jealousy: most days you go with your gut feeling that it runs somewhere deeper than either of them can go. 

And Eridan’s tried pretty hard to beat your depth record in the past. 

You purse your lips, reach deep, deep into yourself to find the parts of you that you spent sweeps pretending were not there. “I did not play this game to lose.” 

“You just said we didn’t lose, FF.” 

“Then start _acting_ like it!” 

A wave rises up behind you, crashing loudly ashore and lapping at your bare heels. Sollux kind of shimmies away from it: Eridan cackles, and is met with a shove. When light flares at their fingertips, red and blue and white, you promptly forget to be any sort of redefined royal and grab both their collars, and yank. 

Their foreheads knock together hollowly and they groan; you seize the opportunity to tug them down, making yourself dead weight. All three of you hit the sand hard, bodies remembering how to be bodies, gods learning how to be gods. 

Eridan breaks through the silence like a shark jackknifing through stillness. “What would you have us do?”

You answer before you’re ready. “Fix this.”

He raises an eyebrow, and you watch some fight go out of him, in ways you learned too late were almost exclusive to you. “Fixin’s never been in my strengths.”

“For once, we’re in agreement.”

“Hop off, Captor.” 

You box him on the earfin. Over his protests, you insist. “This place is new, _brand_ new, and it’s ours! Do you really bereef it would run smoothly with you two brinesuckers at each other throats? Did you learn anyfin from the game at all?!” 

They stare at you, stunned into silence. 

_Cod_ , it irritates you sometimes, how they underestimate your resilience in their own stupid buoyish ways. Eridan grew up with you, and for all that he knows your blood with jarring intimacy he protests with you at every opportunity. Sollux never cared—he saw everything else in you, another side of the heavy coin sewn into your being. 

You are staring down destroyers and mages. But you have stared them down before, and horrible beasts besides, and you have always risen up. 

Rising this time will have to wait until resolution. 

“In that case,” you say, “it’s time for reel learning to start.” 

*

You have stumbled, you have fallen; the sands are your crossroads, like inky miles under all of you. The tide keeps a heartbeat much like your own—slow, even, restless beneath its own illusion. 

Eridan and Sollux are more still than you’ve seen them in your recent memory, watching you watch them. Your pan is a flurry of thoughts, each more frustrating than the last. This can be fixed. This can, like the rest of your planet, be made whole again. 

All you have to do is find out what _this_ is. 

You decide to start at the beginning. The irony that your beginning was also your end does not escape you: it sits heavy and dark in your ribs, tugging at something fierce in your unhurried veins. It’s always been something Eridan’s coaxed out of you, and it’s always been something you don’t know how to handle. 

Now, you reach out and take one of his wrists, feel his pulse beneath your thumb. He does not resist, eyes steady on your face as he tries intently to pretend that he isn’t curious. You bring it towards yourself, stroking over the salt-scrubbed skin that sticks out of his sleeve, and the curiosity gives way, very slowly, to a tenderness that makes you almost hurt. 

Then you keep pulling his arm, to your left towards Sollux. 

There’s a resistance that you were expecting; a very faint tug away. You don’t let it move you. If you end up the rock these two have to crash against for this to work, you’ll be the better for it. 

After a breath (a warmblooded one, shorter, anticipating, not one of yours made to rule) Eridan gives again, and closes the distance himself. His two longest fingers connect with Sollux’s chest, over the stitching of his shirt, and he looks to you for guidance. _Is this okay?_

(Sollux, for his part, stares straight ahead, somewhere over Eridan’s shoulder.)

You give an acquiescing flick of your fins, keeping your touches feather-light. That fierceness in the cage of your bones unfurls its wings, fills you with something like an oil-slicked pride at his readiness to shove his own bravado aside. Eridan reads you like one of his books, the ones he memorized long ago while feigning indifference. It results in him walking his fingers up to Sollux’s shoulder, sliding his gaze to the other boy’s eyes. Contact breaks, very briefly, and then his fingertips alight just under one of his eyes, blown into oblivion once upon a nightmare. 

You hear the intake of air through Sollux’s fangs, zero in on the focus of his blank eyes as it resets on Eridan, and you could sprout fucking wings and soar. It clashes with the swell of terror in you that memory summons. You’re dizzy. 

(It’s not a stretch to remember the way he’d looked, with the lights knocked out of his eyes, it was something you’d always loved, it was something that you’d wanted to avenge, and he’d always been a fan of vengeance, hadn’t he?)

You don’t realize you’re leaning forward the tiniest bit, your hand still hovering in midair, mouth half-open in an order that you haven’t decided on yet. Sollux and Eridan look at you again, less malice in their stares, before fixing back on one another. 

And then Eridan surges forward, and replaces his fingers with his lips, and Sollux’s teeth clamp down on a surprised yelp. 

It’s over almost as soon as it began: he pulls back, violet high on his cheeks, but doesn’t look away in a painfully stubborn testament to his character. _Princes_. 

You drop your hand to your side.

Sollux’s takes over, and follows the narrative of your tangled lives and deaths to where you weren’t keen on going. 

Eridan’s eyes finally lower along with his fins, when his palm rests against your chest, over your bloodpusher, fingers splayed. 

“Fef—”

“I don’t need to hear it,” you cut in. “It happened, and now it unhappened.” 

There’s a note of finality to your voice that you usually aren’t this grateful for. Eridan, to your added relief, does not press further, as you half-expected. His best behaviour and his base behaviour are two very, very different things. You’ve seen both on several occasions, one of them far more fatal than the other. 

Sollux raises a hand like a wriggler answering a pop quiz, and you swallow an inappropriate laugh that bubbles up in your throat. “Come on, then.” 

Eridan obediently shifts his hand over a little, making room for Sollux to feel the memory of the hole he burst into you. His fingers are so much warmer, the blunted claws curling into the fabric of your top. Sollux lowers his forehead to touch yours, and you feel him tremble. You raise a hand to his side, steadying.

“Just shoal you know, I don’t need to hear it from you, either,” you add, tentatively. 

His laugh is more of a high-pitched wheeze. It may as well have stolen the breath from Eridan; you can see his gills working overtime under his shirt, the fabric rustling softly. (You gave up pretending you aren’t a predator when you were still playing.) 

Sollux leans back, then, and nips at his jaw. “Shut up.” 

Eridan blinks. “I didn’t say shit.” 

“You were thinking something.” 

“Oh, lemme just stop that right now if it bothers you.” 

Sollux says, “Let me help with that,” and kind of twists until he can reach the hem of Eridan’s sweater. 

Apparently, it works. 

He doesn’t budge when Sollux tugs his shirt up, just enough to reveal his hips, the first gashes in his sides, and runs an index in a horizontal line across his middle. It’s Eridan’s turn to stare at nothing, at the sea behind you. You wonder if he ever does this himself, in the middle of the day, make sure he’s whole again. 

You wonder if any of you are whole. 

“Fef?” 

It’s quiet, and you give yourself a shake before joining Sollux, even if that’s not quite what Eridan was asking. (You mastered call-and-response sweeps ago, out of need for a different survival.) His skin is cool under your fingers, and you link your pinky with Sollux’s and watch Eridan make an ugly face. You’re prepared to tell him off, but then Sollux snickers and you realize…it was a joke. Eridan Ampora joked about your shoddy excuses for quadrants, and relief floods through you, coaxes your own laugh at last. 

Your head hits Eridan’s chest, and his hand flies to your curls to untangle them. A warmer hand settles between your shoulder blades, and traces slow circles. 

“ED, you know if you make that face too long it’ll freeze.”

“You warnin’ or encouragin’?” Eridan’s voice is a low tenor that vibrates in his chest cavity, ringing into you like you’re one of his monochrome churches to house his growth. 

“Anything’s an improvement on the ugly mug you have now.” 

“My face is all I got goin’ for me. An’ besides I don’t wanna end up lookin’ too much like you, they’ll think Fef’s got a type.” 

“My type is morons.” It takes you a minute to realize you said that out loud, and your head jerks up with a start. “Wait, fuck—”

More laughter, warm and cold and long overdue, and you knock both their heads together again in a much lighter mood than you began the night. 

It’s not fixed, not wholly. But as the three of you roll onto your stomachs, shoving one another and building towers and lumpy creatures out of the charcoal-coloured sand, you think it could be on its way. 

**Author's Note:**

> liberties were taken because im passionate abt canon (semi) deaths, because of who i am as a person. it be like that sometimes   
> this turned out to have less dialogue than i was planning at the start but thats just the way things are here in erifefsol central. get these children a blanket or somethin txt it


End file.
